Today we have a special guest in the series of interviews we conducting here at OSNews. Linus Torvalds, the well known Linux founder, is with us to discuss everything about the kernel, Microsoft, the naming of GNU/Linux and the future. Read on!

Linus doesn't *have* to care about the user level stuff. It's not his job. In Windows, higher level stuff and stuff that should be in user space is placed in the kernel where it adds unnecessary bloat, insecurity, instability, inflexibility, and maintenance problems.
Linux's design is the simple classical model: make the kernel as flexible as possible so that more and more stuff can be written at the higher level without having to worry about the lower level. The evolution is towards simplicity, not complexity. If something is in the kernel, can it be placed outside? If not, why not? If Linus could make Linux a single OS trap that was flexible enough to handle all user space applications, he'd do it. Why should it be different?
The simple fact is, nothing much of interest has been done on the OS level for at least a decade. It's mostly been figured out. Higher level user space is where the action is. If you look at the Darwin kernel (i.e. the kernel of MacOSX), it really doesn't look that much different than FreeBSD or Linux. Where the innovation happens is in the upper layers. If there's a problem in the upper layer, you won't have to worry about it damaging the lower level stuff. If a user writes a bad program, it can never crash the OS. This is the way it should be.